Stranger in a Strange Land

“I’m safe, I assure you.” Mahmoud thought of telling Jubal that he would never marry out of his faith, decided that a gentile would take it amiss—even a rare exception like Jubal. He changed the subject. “But, Jubal, don’t make a suggestion like that to Mike. He wouldn’t grok that you were joking—and you might have a corpse on your hands. I don’t know… I don’t know that Mike can actually think himself dead. But he would try… and if he were truly a Martian, it would work.”

“I’m sure he can,” Nelson said firmly. “Doctor—‘Jubal,’ I mean—have you noticed anything odd about Mike’s metabolism?”

“Uh, let me put it this way. There isn’t anything about his metabolism which I have noticed that is not odd. Very.”

“Exactly.”

Jubal turned to Mahmoud. “But don’t worry that I might invite Mike to suicide. I’ve learned not to joke with him, not ever. I grok that he doesn’t grok joking.” Jubal blinked thoughtfully. “But I don’t grok ‘grok’—not really. Stinky, you speak Martian.”

“A little.”

“You speak it fluently, I heard you. Do you grok ‘grok’?”

Mahmoud looked very thoughtful. “No. Not really. ‘Grok’ is the most important word in the Martian language—and I expect to spend the next forty years trying to understand it and perhaps use some millions of printed words trying to explain it. But I don’t expect to be successful. You need to think in Martian to grok the word ‘grok.’ Which Mike does and I don’t. Perhaps you have noticed that Mike takes a rather veering approach to some of the simplest human ideas?”

“Have I! My throbbing head!”

“Mine, too.”

“Food,” announced Jubal. “Lunch, and about time, too. Girls, put it down where we can reach it and maintain a respectful silence. Go on talking, Doctor, if you will. Or does Mike’s presence make it better to postpone it?”

“Not at all.” Mahmoud spoke briefly in Martian to Mike. Mike answered him, smiled sunnily; his expression became blank again and he applied himself to food, quite content to be allowed to eat in silence. “I told him what I was trying to do and he told me that I would speak rightly; this was not his opinion but a simple statement of fact, a necessity. I hope that if I fail to, he will notice and tell me. But I doubt if he will. You see, Mike thinks in Martian—and this gives him an entirely different ‘map’ of the universe from that which you and I use. You follow me?”

“I grok it,” agreed Jubal. “Language itself shapes a man’s basic ideas.”

“Yes, but—Doctor, you speak Arabic, do you not?”

“Eh? I used to, badly, many years ago,” admitted Jubal. “Put in a while as a surgeon with the American Field Service, in Palestine. But I don’t now. I still read it a little… because I prefer to read the words of the Prophet in the original.”

“Proper. Since the Koran cannot be translated—the ‘map’ changes on translation no matter how carefully one tries. You will understand, then, how difficult I found English. It was not alone that my native language has much simpler inflections and more limited tenses; the whole ‘map’ changed. English is the largest of the human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language—this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and the most flexible—despite its barbaric accretions… or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits… probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as ‘the King’s English’—for ‘the King’s English’ was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew… and it did!—enormously. Until no one could hope to be an educated man unless he did his best to embrace this monster.

“Its very variety, subtlety, and utterly irrational, idiomatic complexity makes it possible to say things in English which simply cannot be said in any other language. It almost drove me crazy… until I learned to think in it—and that put a new ‘map’ of the world on top of the one I grew up with. A better one, in many ways—certainly a more detailed one.

“But nevertheless there are things which can be said in the simple Arabic tongue that cannot be said in English.”

Jubal nodded agreement. “Quite true. That’s why I’ve kept up my reading of it, a little.”

“Yes. But the Martian language is so much more complex than is English—and so wildly different in the fashion in which it abstracts its picture of the universe—that English and Arabic might as well be considered one and the same language, by comparison. An Englishman and an Arab can learn to think each other’s thoughts, in the other’s language. But I’m not certain that it will ever be possible for us to think in Martian (other than by the unique fashion Mike learned it)—oh, we can learn a sort of a ‘pidgin’ Martian, yes—that is what I speak.